How to make money online is one of the top search keywords in Google. This phrase alone mesmerized many with the feelings of having personal freedom without the corporate cubicle mundane life of 9- 6, and more importantly with the unlimited possibility of unleashing the potential of lucrative revenue through the world wide web. But with more and more scam artists on the internet, making some decent money online seems to be more difficult and doubtful for many people. So can you really make money online? Yes I would say, but the process would involve many failures and disappointments and many would eventually give up halfway.

4 years ago, I first started to Google the phrase ‘how to make money online’, it was an exciting experience for me to discover a new path to make money in a comfortable environment, my house. And so I delve deeper into the possibilities and began my first attempt with affiliate marketing through Google Adwords. But end up losing money to Adwords instead. Soon, I found Adsense and created blogs and websites for advertising opportunities, but only to earn an amount that was barely enough for me to buy a burger meal after two months of hard work. Despite that, I met many people of the same fraternity who lives life easier by making money online, they gave me ideas and second hand experiences that inspired me. – That there is no such thing as overnight wealth through the few clicks of mouse. It all begins with intensive efforts with many trial and errors throughout months and even years. For those who are not discourage by my personal experience you might want to try the following ways to make money online:-

1. Advertising and affiliate

Affiliate program/marketing and also known as multilevel marketing  sometimes is an application of crowd-sourcing or networking market whereby a business rewards one or more affiliate users for bringing in new visitor and/or closing a sale using affiliate efforts. It is one of the famous ways to make money online. This can be quite advantageous if you know how to work using Adwords correctly. The method also applies to advertising affiliate where webmasters place advertising banners at their website to receive a pay-per-click commission when a product or service is purchase from a clicked page. These linkage networks of sales and advertising sourcing are considered as affiliate marketing. Some affiliate system are also paid according to the ranking order where the top affiliate marketers who has the most (secondary or tertiary) affiliate followers will receive their contribution of commissions, but in a mild percentage. To begin, you can simply start by Googling for websites that offer affiliate programs. Or you may also try out Webserver’s affiliate program here https://www.webserver.com.my/partners/affiliates-program/faq/

Where space is concern (whether physically or virtually), there would always be a demand and opportunity for the advertising market. This would also mean another opportunity for people to make money online if they have a website or blog space to place advertisements of other companies or through a third party network that sort out these companies such as the famous Google Adsense. Working on Adsense requires minimal capital, or almost no capital if you are using free blog or hosting your site using a free web hosting provider. However earning big bucks from Adsense may be less than a pleasurable experience than you thought. The disadvantages of their service are that you get very low pay-per-click rate  (even with high demand keywords) and you earn absolutely nothing when the ads are not clicked. To get a good amount of genuine clicks, you need to have massive traffics. And to do that, there must be a demand on your web’s content. But the bigger disadvantage of Adsense is its algorithm of content relevance that poses threat to your website. This means visitors who clicked at Adsense ads will be leaded to your competitors’ sites. So now you would think if Adsense really makes sense. Nonetheless, there are many other companies that doesn’t involve ppc earning and pay according to the period of advertisements placed. However these companies are more selective when it comes to choosing the sites to advertise.

(Coming soon on Part 2 – How to make money online with web business and virtual jobs)